Abstract
The "A Famosa Fortress" is one of the oldest partially extant European buildings in Malaysia. It was built in 1511 by the Portuguese and was largely destroyed during the British occupation in 1824. With the subsequent overbuilding of the site by Melaka city today, it is impossible to fully reconstruct this fortress in its physical context. Thus we proposed a 3-D digital model as a way to preserve this historical fortress. The biggest challenge in this research is to determine fortress layout based on various textual descriptions and old drawings and plans. This is due to the lack of any authoritative documentation pertaining to the fortress. In this paper we present our approach in verifying the layout based on several selected old plans of the fortress. Such plans as exist not only differ in their depiction of the fort, but also use various ancient measurement systems. We have adopted procrustes analysis as method to identify the similarities of the plan. We have used the layout constructed from reliable textual documentations as the reference figure. Based on the result, we have identified the plan which is most reliable for our reference in modeling the 3D model of A Famosa.